The Philosophy

of
Suresh Chandra

Edited by
R.C. Pradhan

Indian Council of Philosophical Research

New Delhi
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 12

Paradox of Method:
Suresh Chandra on Social Scientific
Research

KOSHY THARAKAN

The reason why we think that interpretation is restricted to

either inevitable distortion or literal reproduction is that
we want the meaning of a man’s works to be wholly posi­
tive and by rights susceptible to an inventory which sets
forth what is and is not in those works. But this is to be
deceived about works and thought.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Signs
The point that Merleau-Ponty raises here is quite significant
to my discussion of Suresh Chandra’s views regarding social
scientific research. My paper is based on a Presidential Ad­
dress delivered by Suresh Chandra at the Indian Philosophi­
cal Congress held in Jadavpur quite some time ago. What he
said then need not be the whole of his ‘thought’ on this topic.
Some of the points that I raise might have already been taken
care of by Suresh Chandra and even if it is not so, what I
discuss here is still part of his thought and works in the sense
in which Merleau-Ponty understands the work of a thinker.
In another important sense, all that I discuss below is also a
part of Suresh Chandra’s thought and works because he him­
self was one o f my teachers in Hyderabad who trained me to
think philosophically.
 Paradox o f Method 271

In order to understand the paradox of social science re­

search as pointed out by Suresh Chandra, we may recall that
scientific investigations consist in methodical inquiries. It is
the adherence to ‘method’ that makes any inquiry scientific
in the sense of being objective and the results thus attained
as valid for all those who undertake the inquiry. Thus if the
method is the route to scientific knowledge, our investiga­
tions with regard to social reality to be ‘scientific’ cannot but
stick to proper methodology. As Suresh Chandra rightly notes,
there are two types of methods that are widely used in social
science research, namely ‘Positivistic’ and ‘Normative’. Ac­
cording to him, it is ‘... these methods which are responsible
for the paradoxical situation of social science.’5 The positiv­
ists construe social science as fundamentally similar to natu­
ral science. Thus the positivist standpoint represents what is
known as ‘methodological monism’. The rationale for such a
unity of method thesis consists in the conviction that the
social world originates from and is continuous with the natu­
ral world and as such it has nothing to do with normative or
ideological interpretation.2 As against the positivists, the pro­
ponents of normative interpretation consider only such inter­
pretations as legitimate for social sciences. They may very
well concede a positivistic methodology for natural sciences
but nevertheless argue for a different methodology for the
study of social reality. Their rationale for holding such a
‘methodological dualism’ consists in their belief that the two
worlds are not continuous with each other. Rather the social
world is a construction and as such it involves ideological
and norm ative elem ents. There is another strand of
‘interpretivism’ that upholds the unity of method. According
to it any inquiry is interpretive as there is nothing like pure
description. Since all observations are theory-laden, even our
272 KOSHY THARAKAN

observations o f the natural world also have an interpretive

bearing.
Suresh Chandra points out that the advocates of normative
interpretation would even go to the extent of saying that a
positivist social science, say history, is no ‘history’ if it merely
replicates historical ‘facts’. He uses an analogy from the
domain of art to explain the interpretivists’ standpoint. Thus
he draws our attention to the debate between the advocates
of ‘Realism’ in painting and the practitioners of ‘Cubism’.
According to the latter, it is only cubism, only abstract art is
art. Their argument is that only in the case of abstract art is
the mind of man made to think. In a realist painting, the job
is better done by a camera and consequently the artist is
redundant. In other words, the practitioners of abstract art
construe art as a specialized ‘discipline’, as an academic
pursuit. It needs an expert to judge the beauty of an abstract
painting. Thus, with abstract painting, art is liberated from
the hands of the common man. Similarly, the interpretivists
argue that history done in the photographic fashion is no
history. History is no science if it merely copies the events.
Here the assumption is that ‘science’ is an abstraction and as
such it cannot remain at the level of ‘pure descriptions’. The
concept of positivist science is based on the concept of pure
description, something that does not involve any interpreta­
tion. But such a concept of ‘science’ is a myth. Thus Suresh
Chandra feels the need to lift history from the stage of pure
descriptions. History done in the positivist mode is history
cast in the photographic mould. To have the academic status,
history must give up its photographic character. It must ac­
quire the normative and ideological character, if it aspires to
be a science.
Now, the issue as I understand it concerns the question:
can there be at any stage a photographic history, one that
 Paradox o f Method 273

needs to be lifted from pure descriptions? It seems to be an

impossible stage. Unlike the ideological conviction of cu­
bists regarding the prestige of art as something to do with its
belonging to an academic discipline, a status it acquires by
virtue of abstractions and interpretations, the interpretivists
do have an epistemological point to negate the plausibility of
positivist science. The interpretivists would argue that there
could be no photographs’ of social or historical events sim­
ply because there is nothing to be photographed. The social
world is a construction. It is this assertion of the interpretivists
that generates what Suresh Chandra identifies as the Second
Paradox of social science research. The paradox consists in
‘...the kind of opposition that an ideological interpreter gives
to the positivistic interpretation of science.’3 As Suresh
Chandra notes, according to the ideological interpreter there
can be no such thing as a positivistic science. All science is
ideological; there is no objective ‘reality’ and therefore no
‘final court o f appeal’. Even in art, the artist by using his
hands and eyes distorts reality. He paints reality as he sees it
and not reality as it is. But then what is the paradox involved
here? There will not be any paradox of the kind Suresh
Chandra refers to if the interpretivist claims that there is
nothing like reality as it is, all that there is are our view­
points. It is our viewpoints that make reality. It is not that
Suresh Chandra fails to recognize this. He very well notes
this when he makes the following remark about the
interpretivist stance: ‘Not only that none of us as a matter o f
fa ct are in contact with the naked reality, but none of us
could ever be in such a contact. The naked reality is a mi­
rage; all reality is dressed up. Not only this, the dresses con­
stitute the whole of reality.’4 Nevertheless, Suresh Chandra
sees a paradox here. But the paradox arises only because he
believes there are some ‘facts’ out there, some ‘truths’ to be
274 KOSHY THARAKAN

known independent of our viewpoints.5 In other words, the

paradox that he alludes to is an epistemic paradox o f
knowability. The knowability paradox arises from accepting
that some truths are not knowable and that any truth is know-
able.6 If there is reality as it is and all that we can capture by
way of our epistemic practices is reality as we see it, then
there indeed is a paradox. Suresh Chandra seems to sub­
scribe to this.
Suresh Chandra claims th a t£... the occurrence of a histori­
cal event and so also of its being photographed are essential
conditions for a genuine scientific history to be written.’7
According to him, the photographs do have a function, as it
is the datum on which the historians work. The historian in
explaining an event needs to capture the event first by way
of a photograph and only if such a photograph is available
can he proceed to ‘explain’ it. Thus Suresh Chandra argues
that the positivistic account of history cannot be rejected as
useless. Rather it is the foundation of all kinds of historical
interpretations to be given. Here Suresh Chandra seems to
dilute his original characterization of positivistic science.
Earlier he talked about the positivistic science as based on
the concept of ‘pure description’ and denounced it as a myth
or in any case it was a myth for the interpretivists. So when
he now talks about the necessity of positivistic account, as it
is the foundation for any interpretation, it does not necessar­
ily follow that such a foundation is devoid of any interpre­
tation. Rather the datum, the event that needs to be explained
is already the result of some interpretations. Thus the photo­
graph is not a pure description devoid of any interpretations.
The very fact that the historian chooses to capture the pho­
tograph of a particular segment of historical reality rather
than some other segment betrays his interpretive preferences.
I think this is what we primarily mean when we say that all
 Paradox o f Method 275

observations are theory-laden and there is nothing like pure

descriptions. But then this is not just a peculiarity of social
scientific research. All our inquiries are carried out within
this interpretive net. Once this is granted, the issue is the
possibility of further interpretations of the very same photo­
graphic datum. Obviously such possibilities rest on the avail­
ability of the photograph in the first place. This I think is
what Suresh Chandra means when he asserts the necessity of
positivistic account. Nevertheless he envisages further inter­
pretations of such data in the course of historical research.
According to him, histories ‘written in the positivistic fash­
ion are nothing but files of the photograph.’ Thus he says: ‘...
the economic interpretation of history is not the photographic
account of history, yet without the photographic account of
history the economic interpretation of history would have
been impossible.’8 My problem here is our difficulty to visu­
alize any account of history as a photographic account. Take
for example the recent controversy over an NCERT text­
book. It characterizes the events that took place in Russia in
the year AD 1917 as a ‘coup’. Earlier accounts of the same
event describe it as a ‘Revolution’. The ideological interpre­
tations are evident in the very labeling of the event. Either
you may call it a coup or a revolution or any other descrip­
tion you deem to be apt according to your ideological stance.
But it seems impossible to characterize the event devoid of
any labeling. Even a chronicle has to baptize the event and
baptism of any sort is normative at some level. This does not
mean that only the name exists and no ‘event’ at all, yet
without the name we cannot refer to the event. Then where
is the scope for a positivistic account of history?
It may be that what Suresh Chandra calls a ‘positivistic’
account of history is one that faithfully captures the events as
they were understood by the historical spectators themselves.
276 KOSHY THARAKAN

In other words the events that took place in Russia in the

year a d 1917 are understood or described by the people who
‘witnessed’ the events. I say ‘witnessed’ because I hope it
would do justice to the positivistic ideal o f ‘objectivity’ thereby
eliminating the subjective colourings of the participants who
either acted in a manner of favouring the occurrence of the
event or in a manner of preventing it from taking place. But
even this prescription seems to be impossible according to
Gadamer. For Gadamer interpretation is not a matter of re­
construction a, la Dilthey. Rather it is mediation. In order to
understand the past, we mediate the past meaning into our
situatedness. That is, our historicity is an integral part of our
understanding. It is historicity, even though it involves pre­
suppositions and prejudices that open the past for us. The
metaphor of ‘fusion of horizons’ captures this aspect of un­
derstanding. For him, genuine understanding is a fusion of
horizons in which the subject and object of knowing are
fused together such that knowing the other is knowing one­
self. It is this element of ‘prejudice’ in our understanding that
marks Gadarper’s philosophical hermeneutics from traditional
hermeneutics. Thus it seems that the task of writing history
in the positivistic manner is never realizable in the actual
process of history writing.
The impossibility of a positivistic account thus undercuts
the second paradox that Suresh Chandra identifies with his­
torical research. Nevertheless, a shade of this paradox may
seem to remain in other social scientific inquiries, particu­
larly in sociology and social anthropology. Recall that the
second paradox that Suresh Chandra talks about arises only
if we accept the notion of reality as it is over and above our
perspectives or interpretations. Such a view is held explicitly
by some interpretivists and implicitly by positivists with re­
gard to the relevance of an agent’s motives or intentions in
 Paradox o f Method 277

understanding his or her actions. Sociologists of Weberian

legacy consider grasping the agent’s point of view as neces­
sary for our understanding of action. Here the assumption is
that there is some ‘fact of the matter’ with regard to the
agent’s point of view that needs to be captured. Now, if it is
argued that it is not possible to capture the agent’s intentions
or motives, as these are not amenable to objective sensory
perception, the paradox resurfaces. Of course positivists skirt
this paradox in social science research by arguing the irrel­
evance o f such mental states for our understanding of social
reality. For them what is important in understanding social
reality are the objective consequences of action rather than
subjective intentions or motives. Thus after all there seems to
be a paradox of the type Suresh Chandra identifies with social
science research carried out in the Weberian fashion.9
The ideal of recapturing what the agents ‘have in mind’ as
the goal of social scientific understanding operates with what
Quine calls the ‘museum myth’ view of meaning. According
to the museum myth, meanings are determined by the speak­
er’s intention. It conceives language as providing the ‘labels’
for meanings, which are mental entities. Quine’s naturalism
is a strong indictment of this myth of the museum. It rejects
the very conception of capturing the agent’s intentions, as
there is no such determinate ‘fact of the matter’. In other
words, Quine proposes the ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ and
the impossibility of translating the intentions of the agent, as
there is always underdetermination of meaning by experi­
ence. Consequently there can be no objective basis that de­
termines the meaning o f action, let alone recapturing the
agent’s intended meaning. For Quine, reference cannot be
secured merely by recognizing a thing. The rationale behind
this is Quine’s thesis of ‘inscrutability of reference’ and the
philosophical lesson that Quine wants to convey through these
278 KOSHY THARAKAN

problems of reference is primarily the thesis of ‘ontological

relativity’. The adoption of such a framework is arbitrary,
chosen by convention and it is erroneous to think that we can
get to the ‘roots of reference’ in an absolutist manner. Thus
the hope to find the uniquely correct meaning or the attempt
to capture the agent’s intended meaning is like the search
after the Holy Grail.
Thus the second paradox that Suresh Chandra talks about
does not really arise, given that the social world is a con­
struction by the agents by bestowing meaning on their acts
and there is nothing like a uniquely correct meaning to which
the agents have a privileged access. Thus only the first para­
dox remains. It seems to me that Suresh Chandra himself
ultimately recognizes only this paradox as even though he
mentions these two paradoxes, the Presidential address he
delivered was titled ‘The Paradox of Social Science Research’,
thereby negating a plurality of paradox. The paradox as Suresh
Chandra characterizes it consists in the impossibility of avoid­
ing different competing ideologies. Since what is ‘unwritten’
is open to \ multiplicity of readings, different interpretations
vie with each other for legitimacy and we have no ‘final
court of appeal’ to settle it one way or other. It is important
to note here that even this paradox does not arise if one
claims that what is called social science is hardly a science.
Science by its very nature is objective in the sense of being
possible to arrive at intersubjective agreement. So the para­
dox consists in claiming scientific status to social inquiries.
Nevertheless, this way of avoiding the paradox is forestalled
by Suresh Chandra. He considers such a move as an aca­
demic absurdity and says it is no defense of an ideological
interpretation.10 It is so because, as Suresh Chandra points
out, the scientific status of history consists in its ability to
‘acquire the normative and ideological character’ and such a
 Paradox o f Method 279

normative dimension is the aspect of transcending the posi­

tivist ideal of photographic history’. It is absurd to conceive
the very same normative and ideological dimensions that
ascribe the scientific status to history while jettisoning the
scientific status of history. This absurdity may be the real
paradox of social science research.
If it is argued that the kind of interpretation that is central
to doing ‘science’ is not the same as the kind of interpretation
that besets social scientific understanding, then even this
paradox does not arise. In fact, Charles Taylor provides such
an argument." What makes us think that there is no distinc­
tion between the two kinds of interpretation is our blind al­
legiance to the new kind of ‘interpretivism’ that argues for
the unity of method. According to Taylor, this new call for
the ‘unity of science’ based on hermeneutics is not in tune
with reality. He is in agreement with the post-positivist phi­
losophers of science in holding that the logical positivist’s
understanding of science is unacceptable as it failed to assign
any place for interpretation. Nevertheless, Taylor is of the
opinion that such an interpretative element within the prac­
tice of ‘science’ is different from the kind of understanding
that is central to social sciences. Taylor points out that our
scientific understanding arises as a refinement of our ordi­
nary understanding. This ordinary understanding or ‘pre-un­
derstanding’ is prior to any theoretical stance and cannot be
exhaustively formulated. Rather, our formulation of how to
deal with things or theorization makes sense to us because of
this background knowledge or pre-understanding. When we
say that science or for that matter any inquiry is interpretive,
it is this ordinary understanding that we refer to. Interpreta­
tion that is central to social sciences is much more than this
kind of understanding. It is hot just the kind of understanding
that is required for an implicit grasp of things. Rather it is the
280 KOSHY THARAKAN

kind of understanding that one needs in order to grasp the

‘desirability characterizations’. These desirability characteri­
zations are descriptions that lie beyond the limits of natural
sciences. Natural sciences are characterized by the require­
ments of ‘absoluteness’. Natural sciences, as Taylor points
out, seek an account of the world independent of the mean­
ings it has for human beings.
Thus, I would say that even this paradox does not really
obtain as the interpretative dimension that inscribes our in­
quiry as scientific is not the same as that which generates a
multiplicity of interpretations vying with each other. Such
possibilities of different interpretations only underscore the
‘essential contestability’ of social sciences. Nevertheless such
possibilities of interpretation do not rule out intersubjective
agreement. Also, some interpretations may fare better than
some other interpretations when we take the whole of the
socio-historical world into account. Thus one may argue that
the events of AD 1917 as they happened in Russia are better
interpreted as a ‘Revolution’ in the context of struggle as
envisaged in Marxian political theory. This line of argument,
of course, presumes that the events are the outcome of cer­
tain political ideology. The moving force of such ideologies
may in turn rest on the existence of certain other socio-his­
torical reality. Thus, though the social world, including the
historical world, is a construction, an ideological one at that,
as Suresh Chandra rightly points out, the whole of social
reality cannot be treated as mere ‘constructs’. It has got some
‘thingly’ reality that enables such constructions. Sometimes
this ‘thingliness’ of the socio-historical world constricts our
interpretations. For example, the strong archaeological evi­
dence that may obtain in the course of our historical inves­
tigations will rule out certain hitherto accepted interpreta­
tions as no more valid. In other words, the ‘photographic
 Paradox o f Method 281

data’ as Suresh Chandra may call it, plays a crucial role in

our interpretations. Here, it may be pointed out that the ar­
gument for a ‘methodological dualism’ based on the discon­
tinuity of the social world from the natural world is mis­
taken. As has been pointed out above, there are occasions
when the natural world provides the material basis or the
‘thingliness’ of the social world. To that extent the methods
of natural sciences do have a role to play in our investiga­
tions pertaining to the social world. Where the positivists got
it wrong was their refusal to accept this ‘thingliness’ as al­
ready interpreted.

N O TES AND REFERENCES

1. Chandra, Suresh: ‘The Paradox of Social Science Research’,

Presidential address for ‘Logic and Scientific Method’, Indian
Philosophical Congress, 61st Session, Jadavpur University,
Kolkata, October 1986, p. 1.
2. Suresh Chandra equates normative with ideological. But such
identification need not obtain always. The positivist norm of
‘objectivity’ is one that attempts to eschew any ideology. Also,
one may claim the possibility of an ideology that is non-nor-
mative. Thus, a scientific world-view as adopted by some natu­
ralists tries to explain away the normative aspects of epistemic
concepts such as ‘justification’ and ‘rationality’ by invoking a
scientific ideology.
3. Chandra, Suresh: op. cit, p. 6.
4. Ibid., p. 7.
5. In Suresh Chandra’s discussion on Pradhan’s interpretation of
Wittgenstein his belief regarding the notion o f ‘reality as it is’
can be seen explicitly. See in this connection Suresh Chandra:
‘Seeing and Seeing As: Pradhan and Panneerselvam’ in JICPR,
Vol. XII, No. 3, 1995, pp. 111-23.
6. See Jonathan L. Kvanvig: ‘Epistemic Paradoxes’ in Concise
Routledge Encyclopedia o f Philosophy, London, Routledge,
2000, p. 656.
282 KOSHY THARAKAN

7. Chandra, Suresh: ‘The Paradox of Social Science Research’,

p. 3.
8. Ibid., p. 3.
9. Nagel criticizes Weber’s verstehen thesis by stating that none
o f the psychological states that we impute to the agents may
in reality be theirs and even if our ascription is correct their
manifest behaviour interpreted in terms of these psychological
states would not be intelligible in the light o f our own expe­
riences. See in this regard Ernest Nagel: ‘Problems of Concept
and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences’ in Philosophy o f
the Social Sciences; A Reader, (Ed.) Maurice Natanson, New
York, Random House, 1963, p. 203.
10. Chandra, Suresh: ‘The Paradox of Social Science Research’, p.
7.
11. Taylor, Charles: ‘Understanding in Human Sciences’, in Re­
view o f Metaphysics, Vol. 34, September 1980.